The Great Debate, Supporting children with difficulties in reading and writing

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//-->1The Great DebateFree translation, with some examples adapted to English, from thechapter ‘Le grand débat’ in J. Morais, ‘L’art de lire’, 1994. France: OdileJacob.The alphabetic method is without doubt the method of teaching reading which hasbeen used for the longest time in the history of Western civilization. The child startedby learning the alphabet, i.e. the names of the letters in their order. (In ancientGreece it seems that children learned to recite the letters forwards and backwards.For wealthy children each of the 24 letters was represented by a slave!) Then thechild was taught to associate each name of a letter with a symbol. After that he orshe was taught to combine consonants and vowels and to recite syllables without ameaning (ba, be, bi, bo, bu, etc.). It was only after months or even years that the childwas finally faced with reading1. This kind of method has now been abandoned.The great debate on methods has centred for over a century on the oppositionbetween two concepts: emphasis on code on the one hand and whole language onthe other. The former is the phonic method and the latter is the global method.Thephonic methodwas born from a finding that the child has difficulties moving frommaking associations between the names of letters to blending together the ‘sounds’of the letters to obtain the pronunciation of the words. It seems that Germaneducators were the first at the beginning of the sixteenth century to propose methodsbased on the teaching of the correspondences between the letters and their‘sounds’2. At that time functional reading began very early in the learning process,well before all the correspondences had been taught. The order in which thecorrespondences were introduced depended on functional criteria and not on theorder of the letters in the alphabet. Children learned to make words by combining orsubtracting letters. In the French-speaking world, the phonic method was advocatedin the eighteenth century by the Jansenists and the school of Port-Royal. Later, manypeople simply came to associate it with interminable pronunciation exercises of thesounds of the letters. Its functional role was neglected.Theglobal methodprobably originated in the seventeenth century. InVisible World,written both in English and Latin, Comenius proposed starting by directly associatingwords with their meanings. The internal analysis of the words to enable new words tobe read would only come later. In the United States the global method has been usedsince the middle of the nineteenth century. At the end of the nineteenth century andat the turn of the century the global method came to be linked to progressive ideasand concern for education focused on the child. One ‘psychological’ argument usedwas that, all things considered, the phonic method was not very natural. Later on thisargument would be enriched with references to Gestalt theory although psychologistsof that school were not concerned with reading. Moreover, as the psycholinguistRoger Brown noted, the basic idea of Gestalt, according to which learning resultsfrom establishing systematic relationships and underlying principles, was moreconsonant with the phonic method than with the global method3.In France and Belgium the global method gained ground at the beginning of thetwentieth century, notably under the influence of Decroly. The teacher read a text2which he repeated to the children and which constituted the basis for the gradualidentification of the words composing it. A variant of this method was later introducedby Freinet (the ‘natural method’), which replaced the text written by the teacher withtexts produced by the children themselves and dictated by them to the teacher.However, in 1955 Rudolph Flesch publishedWhy John Can’t Read – and What YouCan Do About It,which quickly became a bestseller4. Its success was owing more tothe severity of deficiencies and delays in reading, which greatly concerned manyparents and educators, than to the book’s intrinsic qualities. Starting from the ideathat letters correspond to sounds, he maintains in the same grandiloquent tone as hisopponents that the phonic method is the only ‘natural’ learning method. More serious,he launches himself into political arguments, saying that the global method isundemocratic, that it treats children like dogs which can be trained, and he evenalludes to a communist plot!As Marylin Adams says5, the question of how best to learn to read is the mostpoliticised question in the whole field of education. Kenneth Goodman, formerChairman of the International Institute of Reading and a prestigious theoretician ofthe global method, states: ‘Can we depoliticise the debate? No. Education, includingthe teaching of reading, is political’6. But let there be no mistake. We cannot say thatany one method is part of the programme of a political camp or that it is left-wing orright-wing per se. That is a different question to which method is the best for thesuccessful teaching of children to read who are in a disadvantaged socio-culturalposition from the outset.Flesch’s work was not to have had the greatest influence on the resurgence of thephonic method in the United States; it is another publication, a report in fact, writtenby Jeanne Chall in the framework of an official report.Learning to Read: The GreatDebate,published in 1967, was based on the scrutiny of 22 teaching programmes7.Chall visited over 300 classes in the most diverse social settings in the United States,England and Scotland. The quality of her research has never been contested. Itshould also be said at the outset that Chall had noa prioripreference for the phonicmethod, and yet her study led her to the conclusion that the programmes for teachingreading to beginners which included early and systematic phonic instructionproduced better results than those which did not.Research on reading and learning to read carried out over the last 20 years inlaboratories and schools, and in particular research which has used a rigorousmethodology, is practically unanimous: teaching programmes which include direct,explicit teaching of the alphabetic code are the best8. However, this judgment is onlyof statistical value and does not absolve us from a fine-grained analysis of thedifferent variables involved.The scientists’ convictions are shared neither by the majority of educators andteacher-trainers nor by the heads of government of many countries. In educationfaculties especially the dominant concept favours the global method. This concept isalso particularly appreciated by private companies which have made reading andreading deficiencies into a commercial business. Perusal ofReading Today,the bi-monthly publication of the International Reading Association, is particularly edifying.For the Spring and Summer edition of 1993 the following were announced:3--a dynamic seminar onWhole Language(‘Phenomenal! Will revolutionizeteaching practices!’) with Marie Carbo ($99 per person);seminars onLiterature Connection(‘A creative adventure into the joy of wholelearning. The best investment of your time and money’) ($269 all inclusive,entitling participants to a present worth $30);seminars onWhole language in the classroom(‘Participate in a unique andpowerful experience’);conferences onPathways to Literacyby Bill Martin Jnr ($269 for 5 days,ending in a certificate; if one followed a supplementary course one paid $130extra but received the bestsellerPathways to Literacy,worth $45);seminars on theWhole Language Umbrella(‘Expanding Our Horizons’);seminars onWhole Language Strategiesby Nellie Edge: use of rhythm, happylearning at nursery school,wholelanguage, practical principles concerning thebrain which will make your teaching more powerful, etc. ($98 each,refreshments included).----Finally, an announcement which smacks more of phonic instruction in the guise ofa fashionable term (multisensory learning):Sing, Spell, Read and Write,the multi-sensory language development programme which transforms students – evenlate-learners – into winners.In Europe we have not yet met this phenomenon. We will probably never knowwhen we have managed to establish effective communication betweenresearchers, educators, teachers, politicians … and parents.Why are the ideas of the global method more attractive to the public at large?Why are many teachers hostile to the phonic method? Simple-minded grandprinciples such as ‘reading is understanding’ or ‘we must give back to reading itstrue purpose’ are more accessible and more seductive than linguistic analyses onthe relationship between the spoken language and the written language, whichcalls upon a strange entity - the phoneme, and then goes into technical points.Moreover, the concept of the global method seems to imply faster progress for thechild, in the entire system of language and cognition as well as the wholeindividual; it does not appear to use the apparently narrower concept of thephonic method. At first glance, the latter seems to concern reading only.The attraction that the global method exerts is also partly linked to the fact that itis based on good ideas that supporters of the phonic method neglect – owing totheir desire to point out the importance of learning the code. It is evident thatchildren learn to read more easily if they have a highly literate environment, if theparents themselves like reading and read stories aloud to their children, andinspire them with the desire to read.The ideology of reading is one thing, and the reality of educational practice isanother. It is rare nowadays that the method used in class is purely global orpurely phonic. The expression ‘insistence on the code’, popularized by Chall,indicates that learning the alphabet code is understood in the framework of the4reading of words. As for the global method, its adepts frequently explicitly refer tothe correspondences and accept decoding towards the end of the first year oflearning to read.Unfortunately, the ideologues of the global method and of natural reading try todiscredit experimental scientific research. Their staunchly anti-phonic stance hasconsiderable force in the milieus of officials in charge of primary education policyand organization as well as in teacher-training centres. New teachers start offtheir professional careers without any knowledge of the basic skills required forreading, the reasons for their importance and how to teach them9. It must not beforgotten that teaching to read is also a commercial business. We do not justmean the many seminars mentioned above. Above all there are the schooltextbooks. As the number of consumers is very high the profits for the authors andfor the publishing companies are important. In these conditions groups of interestsget established which are difficult to overturn; and inertia sets in with regard toteaching principles and methods. It is hard to reconcile these with research whichby its nature never stops and is always moving forward … Censorship of researchis a reality.The superiority of the phonic methodSupporters of the global method are right to say, as Goodman did in anotherbestseller,A Parent-Teacher Guide,published in 198610, that readers look formeaning and not sounds or words. In general, this concept is not mistaken inwhat it says but rather in what it does not say: it does not say what is the mostimportant thing to say about a method, i.e. how a child could get to the meaningwithout going through words. The global method encourages the use of thecontext and a strategy of guessing. That may lead to reading mistakes (reading,for example, ‘yoghurt’ instead of the name ‘Danone’ on a pot) which, according toGoodman, should be accepted by educators because they are not far from themeaning but would be ‘charming indications of growth in the sense of control ofthe processes of language’. This is, in fact, a panegyric of subjectivity (what thereader believes) against objectivity (what the text really says)11.Studies evaluating the effects of the methods generally show that children wholearn to read by the phonic method have from the outset an advantage in therecognition of words12. Towards the end of the second or third year of study theyovertake those who learned to read with the global method in speed and in silentcomprehension as well as in vocabulary and spelling. This superiority of thephonic method could be even more marked for children from disadvantagedsocial classes.[In an earlier chapter] we mentioned the work of Barbara Foorman and herteam13, comparing the reading and writing performance of children in the first yearof primary schooling, according to whether they received a lot or a little teachingon the relationships between the letters and their ‘sounds’. There is no extremeopposition here between the phonic and global methods but the variable whichdistinguishes the two groups allows us to consider that one is ‘more phonic’ thanthe other. The results, which can be seen in the table below, speak forthemselves.5Word readingWord spellingLetter-‘sound’ instructionLittleRegular wordsOctoberFebruaryMai304860307184163645145065MuchLittleMuchIrregular wordsOctoberFebruaryMay173135204755020916021126Percentage of words, either regular or irregular, correctly read or written in eachof the three tests (October, February, May) by children receiving either much orlittle instruction over the letter-‘sound’ relations (adapted from Foorman et al., 13).The advantages of instruction in the first year of primary school giving importanceto the explicit teaching of the alphabet code, and thus the merits of the phonicmethod over the global, are clearly demonstrated for reading as well as spellingboth for regular and irregular words.These advantages also concern children who may present learning difficulties, asshown by a recent study carried out in North Carolina. Children still at nurseryschool were selected for possible risk of subsequent reading difficulties14. Theywere sent to classes using phonic methods or classes using global methods(which in fact included the teaching of phonic elements from the beginning of thesecond year). At the end of the second year of formal instruction the childrentaught by the phonic method seemed to have made more progress in generalthan the others but the difference between the groups was significant only for thereading of pseudo-words and the spelling of regular words. The superiority of thephonic method was less apparent in terms of average scores than for the numberof children with reading difficulties. Thus, eight of the children taught by the globalmethod (a third of the sample) against just one taught with the phonic methodwere one year behind in reading words. The phonic method thus appears to bethe most appropriate for helping children at risk to catch up. 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The Great Debate, Supporting children with difficulties in reading and writing

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